This Barbie Is Too Scared of Kencel Culture

'Barbie' is a great time at the movies that can't stop apologizing for its own existence.

There’s a scene in Barbie where our heroine (“the titular role!”) is out of sorts, confessing that she’s not feeling very pretty. Her non-Barbie, real world friends — the gurus of her self-discovery – assure her that this feeling is very human. And here, our omniscient narrator Helen Mirren quickly chimes in to note that “Margo Robbie is not the actor to cast if you want to make this point.” 

In other words: “We know Robbie is very beautiful so it rings just a little hollow for her to cop to feeling ugly, but we still want to point out that even Barbie might not feel pretty sometimes and that’s just part of being a woman, which is an important message! And if that message doesn’t totally land because of how hot Robbie is, well, duh, don’t you think we know that?”

This is the general tone of Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s campy and finely crafted homage to the triumphs and limitations of 21st century feminism via $100 million product placement. There’s a lot of terrific craft on display, but the movie apologizes for its existence to a fault, exhaustively mindful of any issue the Twitter threads (not calling it “X”) might take.